DOI Heft:
The International Studio February, 1908)
DOI Artikel:Williams, Talcott: Augustus Saint-Gaudens
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.28253#0478
A ugustus Saint-Gaudens
sculptor. When his work comes to be summed in
the perspective of his period, men will see in it, as
we begin to discern and do not yet wholly see, the
unrest of a formative period, the stir of conflict,
the doubt and question of a day when all faiths
were in the melting-pot and the surge of rising
national feeling had just become conscious.
Nothing could be narrower than the artistic con-
ditions which imprisoned the young student of
thirty odd years ago in New York. It is incon-
ceivable the things our exhibitions had, though the
best test is that the juries which admired them in
the Academy of Design rejected Saint-Gaudens’s
early work. In Paris, where he studied, he found
himself at the opening of a great period in the art
he was to make his own. He shared its technical
methods. He felt its inspiration. He was per-
sonally affected by its attitude to some topics and
subjects in ways little known. He is often classed
with the French sculpture of his day; but the
resemblance is superficial. All the art of a period
has its resemblances, just as we all know there is a
Declaration of Independence face, a Civil War
type, English
heads of the Com-
monwealth and of
the Tudor days,
differing in glory
one from another.
But those miss the
essential limita-
tions of his art
and work who
confuse Saint-
Gaudens with the
marvelous tech-
nicians of his day.
I confess I never
saw him person-
ally, even that in
meetings not fre-
quent, without
feeling the pres-
ence of the seer.
It is not the utter-
ance or accent of
the prophet which
marks the sculp-
ture of the last
brooding quality was not absent. He won in all
his career not by technical skill but by imaginative
force. It was not his fingers, but his mind, that
made him great, notable and noble. It is nonsense
to deny that his bas-reliefs were not impeccable.
They are often mere flattened presentments. To
eyes patiently trained in the perspective of two
dimensions, they have patent inaccuracies. He
carried detail too far in some of his work. Supreme
genius and incomparable achievement will not
save the detail of the horse’s trappings in the Shaw
monument from just objection, any more than
Arnold was wrong when he pronounced some
sentences of Shakespeare ridiculous. This is
equally true of detail in the Farragut uniform.
Saint-Gaudens had, as all great sculptors have, a
marvelous mastery of surface. No man can be
great in this art and be without this power. But
the test which always must be applied to the work
of great and small, is whether detail is wisely sub-
ordinated as it was, to quote a crucial example, in
the torso of the Theseus. Had there not been this
stern repression, this figure and its associates would
thirty French
salons.
Even from his
earlier work, the
penetrating,
Photograph by Whiddit
PETER COOPER, NEW YORK
BY SAINT-GAUDENS
sculptor. When his work comes to be summed in
the perspective of his period, men will see in it, as
we begin to discern and do not yet wholly see, the
unrest of a formative period, the stir of conflict,
the doubt and question of a day when all faiths
were in the melting-pot and the surge of rising
national feeling had just become conscious.
Nothing could be narrower than the artistic con-
ditions which imprisoned the young student of
thirty odd years ago in New York. It is incon-
ceivable the things our exhibitions had, though the
best test is that the juries which admired them in
the Academy of Design rejected Saint-Gaudens’s
early work. In Paris, where he studied, he found
himself at the opening of a great period in the art
he was to make his own. He shared its technical
methods. He felt its inspiration. He was per-
sonally affected by its attitude to some topics and
subjects in ways little known. He is often classed
with the French sculpture of his day; but the
resemblance is superficial. All the art of a period
has its resemblances, just as we all know there is a
Declaration of Independence face, a Civil War
type, English
heads of the Com-
monwealth and of
the Tudor days,
differing in glory
one from another.
But those miss the
essential limita-
tions of his art
and work who
confuse Saint-
Gaudens with the
marvelous tech-
nicians of his day.
I confess I never
saw him person-
ally, even that in
meetings not fre-
quent, without
feeling the pres-
ence of the seer.
It is not the utter-
ance or accent of
the prophet which
marks the sculp-
ture of the last
brooding quality was not absent. He won in all
his career not by technical skill but by imaginative
force. It was not his fingers, but his mind, that
made him great, notable and noble. It is nonsense
to deny that his bas-reliefs were not impeccable.
They are often mere flattened presentments. To
eyes patiently trained in the perspective of two
dimensions, they have patent inaccuracies. He
carried detail too far in some of his work. Supreme
genius and incomparable achievement will not
save the detail of the horse’s trappings in the Shaw
monument from just objection, any more than
Arnold was wrong when he pronounced some
sentences of Shakespeare ridiculous. This is
equally true of detail in the Farragut uniform.
Saint-Gaudens had, as all great sculptors have, a
marvelous mastery of surface. No man can be
great in this art and be without this power. But
the test which always must be applied to the work
of great and small, is whether detail is wisely sub-
ordinated as it was, to quote a crucial example, in
the torso of the Theseus. Had there not been this
stern repression, this figure and its associates would
thirty French
salons.
Even from his
earlier work, the
penetrating,
Photograph by Whiddit
PETER COOPER, NEW YORK
BY SAINT-GAUDENS